Travel_plans.gdoc
by TrickleDown
why are u too cute?
so why £50?
66cc equals 66cc
£100 equals 100K
18+ equals 66
100… 200… o cute!
fifty pounds of C4
1.18 — a sequel
my area code: 666
Overlook one eight
equals 666
(Mr. haddock) go to Hawaii Five-O cc equals 66
okay O2 — LOL — a cheat code
she sees me you look
who has five bad trips on route 66?
eyo eyo!
look who has America ever lost? 66618 cubes
of O2
Travel_plans.gdoc is the result of an experiment run by Nils Geylen. He describes the process: How do you create a truly random poem with no source text at all? What are the effects of interpretation of the outcome? Using a free, online random code and password tool, I generated a base64 string, converted it to ASCII and applied a Markov chain for length. Using Google, I had this fragment read out loud while simultaneously letting Google try and recognize what it said in a different browser tab. Google uses common phrase algorithms to try and make sense of whatever it thinks it hears, and like a digital game of Chinese Whispers, the outcome was a fragment of text that had an uncanny resemblance to spoken word, but without much context or meaning. I cleaned up the result with a few minor edits to spelling and a few cut-and-pastes for narrative structure, and I found I had come up with this surprisingly evocative text.